


no shade in the shadow of the cross

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, does what it says on the tin, if you squint there’s stuff, it’s a yasha character study, i’m a sucker for beau/jester/yasha so.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-03-31 00:32:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19038718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: Zuala says it was your eyes, first, that gave you away.“Like you’re dreaming of the ocean,” she tells you, hands framing your face. “Like you’re looking for something better than what you can see. Something far away.”





	no shade in the shadow of the cross

**Author's Note:**

> a lot of cumulative feelings about yasha over the course of my catching up, and as she’s finally finding closure  
> (title is from a song of the same name by sufjan stevens)

It’s not that lying comes easily to you; it’s just that none of them know a goddamned thing about Xhorhas. None of them know that, even in a place foreign as the surface of some dark moon, angels aren’t just  born—  they’re  _made_ .

 

For that alone you’ll always be indebted to the Stormlord. For Molly, only a year into his new life and you taking your first steps of yours, Molly whose first inklings of your home were rose-tinted, the way you could only see it through your wife’s eyes.

For giving the both of you a family that truly didn’t care. A family that had never heard, in all their cobbled-together travels and learnings, of the tribes in the wastes of Xhorhas.

 

You wish you’d told Molly more.

You wish you’d done a lot more things for Molly, but you’re trying not to wish for him back, these days. 

 

—

You haven’t seen Clay make his mushrooms with that much reverence since that first time, like it was a gift from his god to the quiet servant of another. Like the earth itself rose up through his long, gentle fingers to take Molly home for the second time, to have him to herself.

(You can’t blame the earth. If you’d been there when he died you think you never would have uncurled from around him, never would have let the snow touch his face.)

 

But of all the things to happen to Molly, you think it’s close to perfect that the earth carry him under her skin, to disperse and make better more towns, more fields and valleys and wastes than he could ever have seen.

 

And that he, clever thing, found the best way to haunt you.

 

You see him in Jester’s newest ribbons, in her sketchbook (usually in the top left corner, lounging in the curve of the crescent moon and watching over everyone). There’s a sketch that startles you— it’s out of Jester’s usual style. Just thin charcoal, a striking rendition of his face, half in shadow, eyes fierce. Dried tears blot at the lower edge of the paper, and you realize that Jester had been trying to remember Molly, to conjure up one last time what he really looked like. 

You see him in Caleb, when he’s a little too shaken up after a fight and he touches his fingers to the center of his forehead with vague, crossed eyes. Know he sees another ghost in the swirl of his own flames.

In the gold in Fjord’s blade, and so clearly it stops you in your tracks, in those familiar golden lines on the back of Beau’s neck, done in Jester’s lovely hand.

If you were braver you would thank her— if you weren’t so afraid to listen to what you know Zuala wants to say in your dreams, you might ask to touch it— but for now you just watch her absentmindedly put a hand to it when she’s nervy before a fight, like it has the comfort of a hot-stone, like it’s a prayer to a god who only ever had six disciples but deserved the world.

 

(Caduceus says he thinks so, too, when you tell him he would have loved Molly. 

He laughs in that quiet, rumbly way when he learns Molly’s last name; says he thinks he could grow the most lovely tea leaves in the low shade of those two hills and pets your hair while you cry.)

—

 

That all is to say that they never needed to know where you came from to love you. 

That Nott started bringing you even more flowers after that watch, ones they’d seen on legs of the journey you weren’t there for. That Jester carried you so damn happily on her back through the streets of Zadash, even though you had to curl your legs around her stomach so your feet wouldn’t touch the ground. That Caleb would send Frumpkin to you for the whole night, if you asked.

That they always greet you like you‘re the last hinge the whole world swings on, like they’d been waiting to tell you absolutely everything since the moment you’d last left (and that between them Jester and Nott usually end up recounting the things you  were there for, too). 

That for the second time in your life you have something worth returning to; for the second time in your life you have something to return to at all. 

That each new place doesn’t have to ill-fittingly shrug on the title of “home” for a few days.

—

 

When Caleb asks if you’re an angel you have to pretend you can begin to explain.

 

You have to pretend that the last eight months feel like part of the same life that preceded. 

You have to pretend that you’ve always been this way.

 

But, well. Barrens don’t birth— they can only host.

—

 

Zuala says it was your eyes, first, that gave you away.

“Like you’re dreaming of the ocean,” she tells you, hands framing your face. “Like you’re looking for something better than what you can see. Something far away.”

 

“Have you ever seen the ocean?” 

You’re curled together on the stretched canvas of your bed, facing inward like two parentheses, enclosing something whispered between your bodies. 

 

She closes her eyes, slow. “No.”

The fans of your hair spill towards each other over your heads, overlapping like neighboring plants. “I used to dream about it, but.”

 

“But?”

 

“I found something closer to dream about.”

 

 

It was the loveliest night, the morning almost as lovely.

You had so few good mornings.

 

You think you could count on your fingers the times you felt safe.

—

 

You’re scarring over, again, pain drifting from between your open fingers like sand, rough and then giving way to the pale, soft stuff of your oldest dreams of the sea.

 

It’s alright, really— Molly always intended to go before life got any less exciting.

What you still can’t shake is the unmoving monolith, knowing that  _you should’ve been there._

You don’t know how to articulate it to the others, but you were  supposed to watch him die.

You were supposed to bury him. In another life, you would have.

 

(In another life, though, you had wings that weren’t just dark shreds. In another life, you weren’t experienced in burying the ones you loved.

 

Every day you get just a little farther from wishing for it back, wishing you could remember how your own feathers felt. There was a night that passed uneventfully— because you can’t remember crossing over— the you that went to sleep would go back, and the you that woke up wouldn’t.

Every day it feels less like you, and more like a story you tell yourself, a past life slowly melting from your back, dripping away from your fingertips and into the earth. Buried a little at a time.)

 

Molly died in the morning, at least. In full glory, jewelry blinking white-silver and gold in the sun, that glorious purple, the swirl of red and peacock feathers. The way you know he looked in the mornings— the good ones, when he wasn’t hungover and wanted to drink in the sunrise with you. 

And blood was always a good color on him, too.

 

When you close your eyes it blossoms out of his chest like a dark flower. In your mind the blood that Molly played like water drapes him like a funeral shroud. It’s awful, and brilliant, and Lorenzo doesn’t see it, eyes black with Molly’s last curse. Doesn’t get to watch that last cosmic burst.

Blood, even soaking his clothes, is Molly’s friend and it makes Lorenzo’s eyes go dark, dark-red like marbles so that he doesn’t see the blinding moment that accompanies a dying star. 

 

And Molly, his open, quiet eyes are cold; glittering stones set in his beautiful head.

 

Just this once, you hope the Stormlord won’t mind you praying to another god. You say one over his grave, press the hem of his coat to your lips, thank the Moonweaver for sending you one of her finest and ask her to give him a good rest.

—

 

Caduceus leans on his staff over you while you run your fingers along the edge of the glaive. You let it open a thin line across your palm and your blood drips to join the ghost of Molly’s. 

He doesn’t move to heal you.

 

“I think,” he says slowly, “that Mr. Caleb was wrong about this weapon.”

 

You say nothing.

 

“He didn’t find any enchantments, but somehow I think this does a very specific kind of damage.”

His hand is larger than yours, and warm. He turns your palm upward and traces one finger above the cut.

 

“My job, as long as I‘m here with all of you, is to undo harm. The harm this blade has done, the lives it’s taken, that’s deep. I can’t undo that.

 

“Mr. Caleb still has a scar across his chest, and it’s been almost a season. He doesn’t want me to heal it.”

 

The bottom of his staff rises to tap against the base of the glaive and thunks again down dully into the earth.

“The hole this made, in your friend, through all of you, I can’t fix.“

He traces again, just above the open line on your palm.

 

“I can fix this for you, if you want. But I think some scars are worth keeping.”

—

 

Beau tells you she didn’t realize how wonderful Molly was until he was gone.

_The world got smaller, and colder,_ she said,  _and I realized it got brighter without me noticing in that inn. He made it brighter. Asshole made me think the world was just that good._

 

—

Jester shakes when she wakes up in the cart. You sleep deep in the belly of it, under the charm on the longer days in a nest while Cad or Fjord take point, and you come to from the sound of her hiccup-crying, curled up against your side or Beau’s and those purple eyes wide because it’s  _that_ cart.

 

You know she doesn’t cry in front of Fjord because her being stronger than him, it’s not a joke, not anymore. You thank the gods, yours and hers and whatever the fuck Fjord’s is supposed to be, that it was you alone and not either of them, because Fjord’s eyes were glazing over when they found you and any ounce of cheer they wrung from Jester was a void that crossed every plane.

 Jester’s so strong— stronger than you, and Beau, and all of Caleb’s magic and the pull of any tide— and when she fists her hands in your furs and burrows into you in the dark you feel like you’re finally doing your job.

—

They weren’t supposed to be the ones to leave you. You left, you  only left when you thought they were okay. You’d let the storm pour right out over your head before leaving them in the middle of a fight like the one Jester tells you about.

 

You think you’re going to start asking them to wake you up, even if you yell (and maybe swat Nott across the room).

_Gods_ , you thought they were fucking dead. You’ve been with them since Nicodranas. 

 

And things have been different, since Molly, since Nicodranas. Since Avantika.

How are you supposed to leave Jester alone now you’ve met her mother? 

How can you leave after seeing one arrow take Caleb down? Fuck, it was the kind of shot you’d pull out of your shoulder without slowing down.

How can you leave when half the flowers you’re bringing to Zuala are from Nott? 

When you’re so used to sleeping when she’s curled up like a cat, with Jester a ball of warmth against your back and Beau’s face open and happy in sleep like it never is, not even when you carry her after a fight. 

When Caduceus isn’t Molly when you’re looking for purple in the night, but he’s bigger even than you and soft and his voice is like the Stormlord’s, like he was sent just to remind you to rest, and he folds your hands around a mug of tea.

 -

Here’s the thing is, you like killing things.

 

Not in the way you were meant to, not in the way that suited the name Orphanmaker— gods, she gave you that name when  _you_ were an orphan— but all the same.

 

Maybe because it always impresses Jester and Nott, or because it always puts the most relieved look on Caleb’s face, or because Fjord’ll never say it but he really doesn’t like getting too close, or because it’s made Beau drop her staff once or twice or five times and she hardly remembers to pick it back up when you twirl your blade in one hand like Molly taught you before sheathing it.

(Cad always smiles, but then again, he’s smiling most of the time, anyway.)

 

It was the impersonality of following the Stormlord that made it easy— executioners are only executioners when they’re on someone else’s orders, after all. You never had to know what preceded, never had to watch the aftermath.

But it’s not so easy, anymore.

 

When Caleb told you the sword is called the Magician’s Judge you almost dropped it there, because there’s a promise in that title, a promise in accepting it from Caleb, of all people.

He’d never say it, but taking it meant you’d stay. It meant you’d be there to see them get hurt before dealing out punishment. It meant you’d know every crime, every sin you were repaying, because judgement means not striking first.

It meant you’d have to watch, every time your friends failed. Every time Caleb’s eyes rolled back with a hit and shook the power from his fingers, every time Nott’s aim blurred from old, choking fear and the numbness she smoothed over it, every time the water, with all the ease of no allegiances, twisted out of Fjord’s grip and in someone else’s, every time Jester’s eyes beaded with tears and her voice climbed cold and empty into a volleying scream, every time Beau was just a hair too slow and caught a blow too heavy to redirect, every time Caduceus’s unflinching calm couldn’t outlast the water closing over his head.

 

Punishment means waiting for the sin, and the last time you weren’t the one to strike first you lost him. The time before, you weren’t brave enough to hit at all. 

You don’t know how you’re meant to do it.

 

But, well. Some days are easier.

Some days you take up watch with Beau and you aren’t afraid of how her eyes get when she looks at you. Some days you walk into your room— _your_ room in _your_ home, what a strange thing— and Jester’s made the whole thing bloom with flowers, and she’s beatific and tracking paint on the floor.

 

You wonder if your freedom makes you less special to the Stormlord— the clouds rolling down from the mountains aren’t just for you anymore and you sleep through the lashing rain. You call for help, and he won’t answer because you both know you don’t need it. 

But you can almost feel what feathers would be like, and it’s just. Familiar.

Maybe that’s what you’ve forgotten, after all. Not Orphanmaker, not some unknown waste you laid in the name of some unknown, unholy thing. 

 

Just that storms can be slept through, because feathers get wet and heavy in the rain. 

Because sometimes water just gathers in the sky without you and has to empty itself back out to sea, and you don’t have to follow it.

**Author's Note:**

> i’m on tumblr @seafleece! come say hello
> 
> i usually shove my miscellaneous writing on @quetzalcoatlmundi


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